When you're celebrating your 50th birthday, and you're a now-legendary racing and high-performance car brand, you make sure your present is a bit more exciting than socks or a book token. Mercedes in-house high-performance arm, AMG, is 50 this year, and it's celebrating by creating a four-door coupé concept version of its wild AMG-GT sports car.
The AMG GT Concept uses the same 4.0-litre turbo V8 petrol engine as the two-door coupe and convertible version, but its has had both power and eco-credentials boosted by the addition of an EQ Power + hybrid module.
Supposedly derived from the KERS hybrid setup used in Merc’s dominant Formula One racers, the EQ Power + system uses a compact electric motor and a set of radically smaller and lighter batteries, specially developed by both AMG and Merc’s new EQ electric car skunkworks. Power goes to all four wheels and, thanks to the electric system, can be shunted to each corner of the car in just the right amount for the conditions. Performance is pretty staggering, and Mercedes-AMG claims a 0-100km/h time of “less than three seconds.”
Mercedes says that the tech used to make the battery pack so light and small can be scaled upwards, leading to bigger, more powerful battery packs for fully-electric cars.
By adding extra doors and a larger boot, Mercedes is aiming to add usability and practicality to the AMG-GT range, and it claims that the concept “blends the high functionality of the performance cars with the sportiness of the AMG GT sports cars”.
Going into production
Mercedes has also confirmed that it won’t stay a concept for long – both the four-door body and the hybrid powertrain will go into production later this year. The car also features a new innovation in lighting tech – as well as LED main headlamps, it uses what Mercedes calls “nano active fibre technology” for its daytime running lights, allowing complex shapes to be made within the headlight in a “freely-styled light cord.”
It’s also not just a case of crowbarring in extra doors to the existing GT shape. Although the GT Coupe donates its chassis, the shape of the body is quite dramatically different.
Speaking at the show, Dieter Zetsche, chariman of Daimler AG and head of Mercedes-Benz cars said: “We are going to roll out “EQ Power [electric drivetrains] across our entire portfolio of plug-in hybrids in the future.
“No doubt we are going all-in with the connected, autonomous, shared and electric future of mobility. That involves a lot of change.”
